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A standing-room-only crowd packed the hang-out area on the 11th floor of Buzzfeed's Flatiron District headquarters last night, draining plastic wine glasses and beer bottles, but tasting blood.

On the docket was a panel discussion featuring Ben Smith, Buzzfeed's editor-in-chief, and Andrew Sullivan, blogger of the first wave who recently hung out his own shingle, taking a blog that had lived previously at The Atlantic and The Daily Beast independent. The evening was part of a sometimes crushingly tradey Social Media Week series of events, but this one was staged as a duel.

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Smith, recently profiled in the Styles section of The New York Times as a sort of wonder boy but really a long-time politics blogger who'd hung his hat at The New York Sun, The New York Observer, the Daily News and Politico before becoming the chief editor of Buzzfeed, is a vocal advocate of new models for news revenue like "native advertising" and "sponsored content"—"words that set off my Orwell bells," as Sullivan would put it during a rambunctious, more-than-an-hour-long debate that at times seemed uncomfortably heated, and of which the moderator, Atlantic business editor Derek Thompson, lost almost all control.

It basically came down to this: The type of in-house, advertiser-funded content that Buzzfeed and other online publications label as sponsored yet publish in their standard editorial templates is anathema to Sullivan, who believes readers are being duped. Smith argues that discerning readers have no trouble distinguishing sponsored content from reportage and that Buzzfeed's church-state firewall has remained intact.

Sullivan wasn't buying it.

"The more I think about it, the more troubled I am by this," he said. "If journalism is not understood to be separate from advertising, then it has lost something incredibly important in a democratic society."

Later on: "I'm not being a fuddy-duddy about this," said Sullivan. "I think every possible avenue [for making money] is worth exploring. But I don't want to destroy the village in order to save it."